It's good of you to ask me, Sir, to tell you how I spend my daysDown in a coal black tunnel, Sir, I hurry corves to earn my pay.The corves are full of coal, kind Sir, I push them with my hands and head.It isn't lady-like, but Sir, you've got to earn your daily bread.

I push them with my hands and head, and so my hair gets worn away.You see this baldy patch I've got, it shames me like I just can't say.A lady's hands are lily white, but mine are full of cuts and segs.And since I'm pushing all the time, I've got great big muscles on my legs.

I try to be respectable, but sir, the shame, God save my soul.I work with naked, sweating men who curse and swear and hew the coal.The sights, the sounds, the smells, kind Sir, not even God could know my pain.I say my prayers, but what's the use? Tomorrow will be just the same.

Now, sometimes, Sir, I don't feel well, my stomach's sick, my head it aches.I've got to hurry best I can. My knees are weak, my back near breaks.And then I'm slow, and then I'm scared these naked men will batter me.But they're not to blame, for if I'm slow, their families will starve, you see.

Now all the lads, they laugh at me, and Sir, the mirror tells me why.Pale and dirty can't look nice. It doesn't matter how hard I try.Great big muscles on my legs, a baldy patch upon my head.A lady, Sir? Oh, no, not me! I should've been a boy instead.

I praise your good intentions, Sir, I love your kind and gentle heartBut now it's 1842, and you and I, we're miles apart.A hundred years and more will pass before we're standing side by sideBut please accept my grateful thanks. God bless you Sir, at least you tried.

(In 1842, a commission of the British government examined the working conditions of women and children who worked in the coal mines. An illiterate girl of 17, Patience Kershaw, gave this testimony)

"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock"

*"Some works which politically are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people, and the more necessary it is to reject them" (Teses de Yenan, Mao Tsé-Tung).

"Meet Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger and former prostitute whose explicit, funny, articulate, eye-popping online Diary of a London Call Girl has fascinated millions of readers worldwide. Here she is: Belle, the famous tart, whose books became runaway bestsellers, who was played on screen by Billie Piper in the television series based on them, whose brand is instantly recognisable to anyone who uses the internet or bookshops and who has stirred up a considerable amount of controversy through her writing-as-a-whore career, not least because she has always refused to condemn prostitution as being necessarily bad or sad: our very own second-wave Happy Hooker. (...)

She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants". (entrevista integralaqui)